Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The Age of Loneliness is Killing Us

‘Social
isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a
day. Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity.’ Photograph: Feri
Lukas/Rex

What do we call this time? It’s not the information age: the
collapse of popular education movements left a void filled by marketing
and conspiracy theories.
Like the stone age, iron age and space age, the digital age says plenty
about our artefacts but little about society.

The anthropocene, in
which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish
this century from the previous 20. What clear social change marks out
our time from those that precede it? To me it’s obvious. This is the Age
of Loneliness.

When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man”,
he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the
start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other.

The hominins
of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped,
to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with
others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any
that has gone before.

Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults.
Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A
study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights
the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50, and is rising with astonishing speed.

Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses,
use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to
explain the speed of our social collapse.

These structural changes have
been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and
celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man -
competition and individualism, in other words - is the religion of our
time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders,
self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone.

For the most
social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such
thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The
rest is collateral damage.

A government study in June revealed that Britain is the loneliness capital of Europe.
We are less likely than other Europeans to have close friends or to
know our neighbours. Who can be surprised, when everywhere we are urged
to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin?

We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting
insult is loser. We no longer talk about people. Now we call them
individuals. So pervasive has this alienating, atomising term become
that even the charities fighting loneliness use it to describe the bipedal entities formerly known as human beings.

We can scarcely complete a sentence without getting personal.
Personally speaking (to distinguish myself from a ventriloquist’s
dummy), I prefer personal friends to the impersonal variety and personal
belongings to the kind that don’t belong to me. Though that’s just my
personal preference, otherwise known as my preference.

One of the tragic outcomes of loneliness is that people turn to their
televisions for consolation: two-fifths of older people report that the one-eyed god is their principal company. This self-medication aggravates the disease.

Research by economists at the University of Milan suggests that television helps to drive competitive aspiration.
It strongly reinforces the income-happiness paradox: the fact that, as
national incomes rise, happiness does not rise with them.

Aspiration, which increases with income, ensures that the point of
arrival, of sustained satisfaction, retreats before us. The researchers
found that those who watch a lot of TV derive less satisfaction from a
given level of income than those who watch only a little.

TV speeds up
the hedonic treadmill, forcing us to strive even harder to sustain the
same level of satisfaction. You have only to think of the wall-to-wall
auctions on daytime TV, Dragon’s Den, the Apprentice and the myriad
forms of career-making competition the medium celebrates, the
generalised obsession with fame and wealth, the pervasive sense, in
watching it, that life is somewhere other than where you are, to see why
this might be.

So what’s the point? What do we gain from this war of all against
all? Competition drives growth, but growth no longer makes us wealthier.

Figures published this week show that, while the income of company
directors has risen by more than a fifth, wages for the workforce as a
whole have fallen in real terms over the past year. The bosses earn -
sorry, I mean take - 120 times more than the average full-time worker
(in 2000, it was 47 times).

And even if competition did make us richer,
it would make us no happier, as the satisfaction derived from a rise in
income would be undermined by the aspirational impacts of competition.

The top 1% own 48% of global wealth, but even they aren’t happy. A survey by Boston College
of people with an average net worth of $78m found that they too were
assailed by anxiety, dissatisfaction and loneliness.

Many of them
reported feeling financially insecure: to reach safe ground, they
believed, they would need, on average, about 25% more money (and if
they got it? They’d doubtless need another 25%). One respondent said he
wouldn’t get there until he had $1bn in the bank.

For this, we have ripped the natural world apart, degraded our
conditions of life, surrendered our freedoms and prospects of
contentment to a compulsive, atomising, joyless hedonism, in which,
having consumed all else, we start to prey upon ourselves. For this, we
have destroyed the essence of humanity: our connectedness.

Yes, there are palliatives, clever and delightful schemes like Men in
Sheds and Walking Football developed by charities for isolated older
people. But if we are to break this cycle and come together once more,
we must confront the world-eating, flesh-eating system into which we
have been forced.

Hobbes’s pre-social condition was a myth. But we are entering a
post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our
lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.